The War of Something or Other

[Amos]

In Yuvna's opinion, no horse, no matter how well-formed, should ever occasion a journey that would rival the interminable epics of mythology.

Yuvna spoke from experience, not blind opposition. Forty-four years ago she had led a mission comprised of herself, thirty-three standard bearers, twenty-two blind philosophers, eighty-eight monks from eighty-eight unique religious sects, and sixty-six tense handlers handling sixty-six placid jaguars, to recover the bones of a fabled pegasus. The hovering nag had been the property of a demiurge until a chance contraction of Potomac Horse Fever while journeying in China ended her life. The demiurge mummified his former mount and had entombed her within the sacred stones at the base of either the West Great Mountain, HuÃ* Shān, or the North Great Mountain, Héng Shān. Yuvna had wanted to revive the pegasus and keep it for herself, but she had got lost in the Gobi Desert, her retinue subsequently dying of thirst, and wandered the sands for ten years with only scorpions and marbled polecats for company.

All three of the beasts! Yuvna thought wonderingly. Who did she know in Bloomingdale that was strong enough to pull it off?

In alphabetical order: Foltz, Jacob -an employee of the Bloomingdale miliatary circus; Hoschander, Mary - proprieter of the hair and beauty salon where Yuvna worked part-time sweeping up clippings and restacking the magazine pile; Kellens, Gordon - owner of a bookstore and the fortunate victim of a time travel accident that had availed him of a destitute and slovelnly existence as a poet in ancient Sumeria and relocated him in Bloomingdale University, where he had easily passed as a student and eventually earned his Bachelor of Arts for his remarkable thesis that revolutionised the study and interpretation of the Gilgamesh Epos; Litchfield, Thorkild - head swami of the Bloomingdale metaphysical swim team and one of the so-called "Seven Jade Tigers", the sub rosa merchant society who bought and sold Krimsah in enormous quantities across the entire continent; Tajovy, Karel - a handsome and introspective gardener at the palace whom the revolution had ignored and all of society bar Yuvna had forgotten.

The current King was Selena's grandson, she knew.

False, or at least not quite true. Alyas had been adopted by Selena shortly after Yuvna's disappearance. He was the unacknowledged progeny of a dying novelist whom Selena had admired and met several times at the society dinners she otherwise detested so much. When Selena's biological children, a single son and two daughters, died when their blimp was sucked into a magical vortex, she declared Alyas her heir.

Yuvna sat smoking Krimsah, and wrote volumes of splendid literature.

The thousands of pages Yuvna covered with her often confused, occasionally thoughtful, and interminably ecstatic scribblings had survived the flood, but were afterwards turned into paper mache by a leak in her bedroom ceiling.

"Your cat let me in," he said, smirking widely, his evil grin revealing the metal teeth of an automaton. It was the robot! But how had he found her after all these years? No, wait a minute, that had never happened.. He didn't have the metal teeth of an automaton, he was wearing braces.

This fatal second meeting of a dead girl and her masochist never happened outside of the detectives' imagination. All subsequent interactions between the two likewise happened on a purely abstract plane. In one his psychic circumambulations Joshua K. Phoenix stumbled across this weird realm of sublimated desire and, returning often to spy and take notes, based several screeplays on what he saw there. Only one of them was ever actually made into a film, The Empress of the Electric Moon, though only a few hundred people ever watched it - Joshua himself did not, and while Yuvna's ex did, he was unable to recognise it as the twice-removed child of his unrequited love.

[Amos]

I must fail. I must relent. And I must forget.

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All that remains of Yuvna now is the outline of her handprint on the glass. The bones that do not belong to her, never belonged to her, are in a heap before the mirror. How do I say this, that only her mark is hers, that her eyes are not her eyes, that her hands are not her hands, that she has only used them, I suppose is how it must be said, that they were the tools with which she worked. And since her intelligence and sensibilities were never dislocated from this biological machine it is right to say that those were not hers either. Her thoughts were not her thoughts, her anger was not her anger, her love was not her love. There is an emptiness where I once assumed Yuvna to be, and that emptiness is Yuvna. It would be more right to say that the handprint on the mirror is not her either. Her name is not even her name since it cannot refer to anything, so why say it as if it were? And the emptiness I just mentioned is most definitely not Yuvna, why did I write that just now?

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There is a stain on my desk, a round stain from the bottom of a coffee cup, and this right now is Yuvna. In five minutes she will be the rusted shell of a car half-buried in the sand at Oreti Beach. Three days later you will notice her dripping from the roof of a museum, but by nightfall she will be the soft bristles of an old toothbrush; A child will say her in his sleep, and in the morning she will crow with the rising of the slow sun while shaking the dirt from her feathers.

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Yuvna's feet smell like dry barkchips baking in the midday heat. Her toes are small red cherries. Her shaven calves share the softness of the neck-feathers of a painted honeyeater, and her belly is the same white as that of the japanese flying squirrels'. Her buttocks are compressed and spotted and can be found growing under hedges and in the trunks of fallen trees. Her vulva has two pairs of wings but only the forewings are used for flight. Her hips were sawed from a mannequin. Her bellybutton houses a bell cricket and the bell cricket houses another, smaller, bell cricket. Her chest is a jukebox that plays old romantic tunes. Her armpits taste of pasta boiled in salt-water and have the texture of an unripe tomato. Her arms she mostly keeps in a violin case. She takes them out when she goes swimming. Her neck is a wooden barrel stuffed with egyptian cotton. The carpenter who fashioned it went by the unlikely name of Virgil. Her fingers are porcelain cup-handles snapped from store-bought mugs. Her cuticles are snail shells. Her palms are a shelter for runaway dogs.

Her eyes are two white mice. Her ears are secluded paths that lead from here to never. Her mouth is a book of law in Babylon. Her skull is the kitchen of a chinese restaurant wherein her thoughts originate from steaming bowls of rice, and her memories are two grey herons wading at the edge of a lake. Her desire is a seal swimming under the arctic ice.

Her hair is a gypsy moth.

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There is evidence that ultrasound in the range emitted by Yuvna causes forgetfulness in cattle and recursiveness in swans.

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I do not know. I do not know. I do not know. All intentions fade, all horizons recede into the corroded mortar of estrangement. Restless, uncomfortable, exacting, remote.

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My name is Yuvna. I have dreamt this maze that you call a city.

[Amos]

Gorax and Tiffany walked for so long that the war they left behind seemed hardly real.

The sound of the rain falls through the ceiling. It passes through Yuvna and through the mattress and through the carpet and disappears into the earth. Likewise echoes of the wind pass through the walls like ghosts, circle around the room, fly down the hallway and vanish through a window. Tired of this, Yuvna heads outside and grazes for a while on wild pumpkins and turnips. The sun has not yet bothered to rise. After filling her round little belly with vegetable matter Yuvna bathes. Angelfish gather around and clean her body of parasites and ticks with their mouths and suck bits of turnip loose from inbetween her teeth.

Now enter Gorax, astride his dreadful ostrich, his eyes like flour sacks, his hands like vacant motel rooms. I don't know why, but here he is anyway. Tiffany is tied to a sprawling and companionless acacia. The rain is bright. It falls through everything. It has nowhere to land.

Once Gorax had been a gardener. His name then was Karel Tajvoy. By the time he was twenty-three he was completely mad - he believed he was the King. By coincidence the King, also mad, was under the illusion that he was a gardener. It was allowed by the people of that country that it would be both practical and an act of compassion to allow them to switch places.

Gorax stands outside Yuvna's house and gazes into a window. The glass is fogged and he can only see blurs and mirages. A part of the blur moves, and he decides to knock. Too late he realizes his mistake - knocking on the window when paying a house call is uncommon and probably viewed with suspicion. A terrible faux pas. He falls to his knees and weeps. Crying is uncalled for but he enjoys it and indulges on the slightest pretext.

His tears become the rain. He smells like an estuary - a dead octopus washes onto the shore of his feet. Floating bits of junk and debris are stranded on his toes. Tiffany is a bicycle abandoned for now in the grass while he searches for bits of broken glass and mudcrabs. The rocks are thin, black, and brittle. Twice a day a train passes and he stops his wandering to watch it. It is long, russet, and blind, like an earthworm. It orbits the estuary and obeys no human laws. Intoxicated by movement, driven by a monophonic fear of stopping. It roars. It is gone. Evaporated. Gorax resumes himself.

A story might emerge from this muck. I promise nothing.

[Amos]

1. pain is time. memory is an inverse hell.

The first thing to do, thinks Gorax, is to get Yuvna out of her house. Since Yuvna is her house, she must be got out of herself.

Gorax was mad because he was the soul of a king inside the body of a gardener, thinks Tiffany. Now that he no longer wants to be king he is nothing but a body. This is why he is drawn to Yuvna.
She bites Gorax on the finger, drawing blood. He howls like a dog, and Yuvna comes rushing outside to see what is the matter. So begins their journey.


2. pain is the mouth of time. i can speak only from memory. speculation and prophecy are memory inverted. memory is an inverse hell.

Gorax and Yuvna walk together along the streets of Bloomingdale. She is a little bit drunk. The sidewalks are covered with green lichen and slippery in the parts where the sun hasn't yet pushed out the shade. A few other figures can be seen sulking about but the people in her neighborhood are mostly unemployed and have no reason to be out of bed so early.

Gorax is telling her about his travels, his homeland, and how he abandoned his people. She is surprised by how cheerful he sounds, and although he is obviously mad his kindness and love for his ostrich make her feel completely at ease. She in turn says as little as possible knowing that her breath smells of brandy and turnips. Their aimless ambling takes them along a riverbank which runs adjacent to a railway which crosses over a busy road. Red lights flash at the crossing and two candy-striped arms lower to keep the traffic in place until a train has passed. The people waiting in their cars are not in a hurry but annoyed to be held up all the same. They grip their steering wheels tightly and glance furtively at the clocks on their dashboards then drive off at a completely reasonable pace. Most of their impatience is feigned for the sake of the other drivers. They don't want to be seen to have nothing important to do.

They pass by an all-girls' school and large empty fields intended for sporting practice but which are mostly unused. Leaves fall from the trees on the bank of the river but do not float far before being caught up in the reeds that choke the sides. The sun is high in the sky, but capricious in how it allots its warmth. Gorax has hardly stopped talking, but Yuvna has long stopped listening to anything but the crunching of the gravel under their feet and the distant hum of activity in other parts of the city. As night falls her white sneakers seem to almost glow.


3. pain is pain inverted. pleasure is the abnegation of time and concurrent hells. delight is the figure of unqualified tolerance. its aspect is fatal to speech.

The main difference between myself and Gorax, thinks Tiffany, is that he is unconsciously cruel to many people, while I am wittingly cruel to only him. Both his callousness and his kindness stem from his narcissism. He is kind to me because he knows that I love him and mistakenly thinks that if he takes care of me that I will eventually stop hurting him. His feelings for Yuvna, though, Tiffany cannot understand. He seems to like her but without understanding or even attempting to understand her. He talks to her as if she were his sister or his best friend and she completely ignores him, yet he goes on as if he hasn't noticed. Being a narcissicist he is incapable of loving anything other than himself, so maybe he just wants to mate with her. This is the tentative conclusion Tiffany reaches before losing interest in the subject.

They walk for many days and nights, sleeping at first in empty warehouses and shopping malls, then, after leaving the city limits, under hedges and in barnyards. They learn quickly not to sleep to near to lakes and ponds, where the air is cold and damp and mosquitoes are more prevalent. Once every few days they bathe however and let the fish clean their bodies with their puckered, rubbery mouths. On a moonless night they end up standing closer together than usual. They mate several times before losing interest in the subject.

Their topics of conversation are varied, including but not limited to: no I can't be bothered with it.

Finally they cross over the border between past and future that is liminality and into a land where time is not a frozen void that mingles human terror with the immobility of stone. Whatever happens here, we will see no more of the old crew. No more ex-boyfriends, no Bensons, no Shnookums, no Phoenix. Or should they appear they will be greatly changed.